Faithless Execution: Fighting Presidential Lawlessness

The first few days of rolling out my new book, Faithless Execution, have been exhilarating, with few things more gratifying and humbling than the wonderful review by one of my very favorites, PJ Media’s own Roger Simon.

It has been uplifting to see how many people really are alarmed—rather than indifferent, as I worried—to the problem of rampant presidential lawlessness. People really do grasp that the separation of powers, which is so threatened by President Obama’s usurpation of the powers of the states and other federal departments, really is the key to protecting our liberties. Too much accumulation of power in one government official’s hand—particularly, the Framers observed, the joining of the legislative and executive power in a single department or person—is the road to tyranny.

When people grasp that, they similarly grasp that presidential lawlessness is not a conservative versus liberal issue, nor Republican versus Democrat. It is a question of whether we still aspire to be a republic under the rule of law instead of subjects under presidential whim. If they are not knocked down, the precedents that President Obama is setting for imperial executive power will be available for exploitation by every future president, regardless or party or ideological orientation. That ought to frighten all Americans, not just opponents of the current president’s policies.

I make a sustained attempt in the book to explain that impeachment—the ultimate constitutional response to presidential lawlessness—is a political remedy, not a legal one. You can have a thousand impeachable offenses, but if there is not a strong public will that the president be removed, impeachment is a nonstarter. The political case for removal is the one that is uphill. Establishing the legal case for impeachment—i.e., demonstrating that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed—is the easy part.